Alike many product teams, ours sometimes have a tendency sometimes to keep a large amount of focus churning out new products with all of the features and performance characteristics our customers want in quality networking products.

While one of our product traits is #useability, we all know, there are features that are perhaps not as straightforward to the layman, small business owners, even though these savvy folks understand the need to use these features for their businesses to be successful.

So in that spirit, we have assembled a team of young, bright individuals and challenged them with an aggressive list of topics. The first of these topics is an informative yet light video-on-demand on Quick VPN configuration tips for some of my RV Series router models. Configuring VPN’s, even though it sounds exciting (yes that is a joke), is not always straightforward, so this video should be very helpful for many.

I would like to introduce you to Ruben:

I also wanted to pass along two Cisco Small Business Links that house a set of VoD’s that are a little more technical in nature that our team in Greenville has produced for topics such as Configuring VLAN’s on the RV320 and RV325 and setting up multiple types of VPN’s on RV130, RV320, RV325 and others. These again are little more technical in nature, but very informative and helpful in getting your Small Business Networking configured as needed.

Over the past several years, I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of two important trends in the networking industry – the evolution of open standards and open APIs, and the definition of policy as the key interface to the network.

Open is an extremely important word to the future of networking. The simple dictionary definition for open means not closed or locked, allowing access to inside, and freely accessible.

The ultimate networking environment will allow a user the freedom to connect anything together in the cloud and to an existing environment. In order for this vision to happen, companies must work together to create a common language.

OpenStack has garnered a lot of interest in the development community and among our customers. We at Cisco have been actively helping to shape the discussion around policy. Working collaboratively with our partners and competitors, we helped create Group-Based Policy (GBP), an intent-driven policy API for OpenStack.

The Group-Based Policy initiative represents a significant innovation in how users conceive, manage, deploy, and scale their applications in OpenStack clouds. And its now available as a 100% open source solution available to any vendor. When coupled with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, we are able to offer our customers a completely policy-driven network.

While change is a hallmark of the IT industry, the actual levers for change are have actually remained fairly stable. Vendors were the initial agents of change largely because they were the only ones with the critical mass of smart people, R&D, manufacturing and service delivery to seed and then maintain a fledgeling industry—barriers to entry were a bit higher 30 years ago than they are today because the innovation was happening at the physical layer—we were still fighting over layer 1 and layer 2. The best thing that happened to this industry was the rapid emergence of standards developing organizations (SDOs) as the next arbiter of change. The action moved up the stack and networking exploded because protocols like Ethernet, TCP/IP and BGP were standardized and created a stable, level playing field that benefited everyone alike. Over the last few years, the open source movement has emerged as the latest lever for change in the industry. By democratizing the whole process of innovation, open hardware and software is giving rise to an astounding rate of change.

Now, there is many a VC pitch that’s hinges on painting Cisco as the ossified incumbent (trust me, I have seen a few), but the inconvenient reality is we have been active contributors in the open networking initiatives that have emerged in the last few years including ONF, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and OPNFV. To that list, I am pleased to announce that we recently joined the Open Compute Project as a Gold member. The motivation behind our membership is similar to our involvement in the aforementioned open networking projects: we see the OCP community as an excellent forum to work with our customers to co-develop solutions to meet the challenges they face.

As you many know, OCP is structured into a number of projects (networking, server design, storage, etc). While there are a number of areas where we could (and will likely) engage, the first project will be Networking (shocking, I know), where we feel we can make some useful contributions to the existing work underway.

Beyond this, I do not have a whole lot more to share—to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, the coin of the realm is code and specs and the work is just getting started for us, but expect to see some cool stuff in the near future.

At Cisco, as you might imagine, we talk a lot about the Internet of Things, and now about the Internet of Everything (IoE). You can find some great videos and background about IoE here, here and here. As technology continues to transform our world – from how businesses operate to how we connect with each other to how we control features in our homes – the paradigm is shifting. And it’s creating exciting opportunities for companies that are prepared to capitalize on them.

It used to be that technology was itself an outcome – people wanted an application or they wanted a robot programmed to do certain things. It was viewed simply as a tool, and one that was often operated in a siloed business unit within a company. That world, at least for companies who want to stay competitive and maximize potential, is no more.

Technology is no longer just a tool. It’s no longer a means-to-an-end nor is it a strategy that operates in isolation. As our CEO John Chambers recently predicted, “every company is going to be a technology company” (a prediction that you’ll also find echoed in many leading business journals). To respond to consumer demands and consumption models, we all must embrace technology and harness its potential to transform businesses.

Hong Kong Academy (HKA) is an International Baccalaureate school with students ranging from pre-school to grade 12. They are a relatively small school in terms of total employees and students. Their goal is to offer a personal and individualized form of learning.

HKA identified that the best way to achieve their goals was to encourage the use of technology to create a community amongst teachers and students. They recently constructed a new building and had the opportunity to build a network to meet their current and future requirements.

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